SUSE has seen some major changes over the last year, not least of them being the appointment of a new CEO, Melissa Di Donato.
She spent some time with Kathy Gibson, sharing her plans for SUSE and thoughts on a range of industry issues.
Melissa Di Donato was appointed as CEO of SUSE in August 2019.
She takes over from Nils Brauckmann who led SUSE for the last eight years, saw it achieve record revenues in 2018, and presided over its buyout from MicroFocus in 2019.
As the company enters its new phase, the appointment of Di Donato – SUSE’s first female CEO – aims to drive its growth from a technology start-up to a corporate enterprise player.
Prior to SUSE, Di Donato was chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at SAP, responsible for the worldwide revenue, profit and customer satisfaction of the company’s digital core and cloud solutions.
She also held senior executive positions at Salesforce and was recognised for her contributions to growing global organisations by winning the 2018 Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Commercial Management.
Di Donato is no stranger to the nitty-gritty of technology, having started out 25 years ago writing code for SAP solutions. Her growth into management at a global leader like SAP has given her a wide range of experience that she is keen to put into practice at SUSE.
“I come at the business from a different perspective,” she says.
SUSE has recently come out of the Micro Focus stable, and is in the process of reinventing itself.
Before mapping a route forward, Di Donato felt her first order of priority should be to take a step back and build an accurate picture of where it is.
“I met with almost 100 customers in 100 days,” she says. “We got a research company in to interview customers that we won and others that we lost.
“We did this to find out what we need to know and what we need to add to our offerings. The key is to build on what customers want.”
The prospects for SUSE are exciting, she adds: “Open source software is now a critical part of any thriving enterprise’s core business strategy.
“We are well positioned to emerge as the clear leader of this shift, with our ability to power digital transformation for our customers at their own pace and with agile, enterprise-grade open source solutions, edge to core to cloud.”
Di Donato’s underlying strategy is to help customers simplify, modernise and accelerate their own digital transformation journeys.
“100% of customers want to know what we are going with the current buzzwords that the industry is bandying around.
“The user of technology was supposed to simplify the business environment but instead it’s adding a load of complexity.
“People just want it simplified, so I need to ensure we have a simple platform.”
The next pillar in the new SUSE strategy is to modernise their systems. “Modernisation can come from anything: from containers or multi-cluster containers, hybrid cloud or multi-cloud.
“Whatever the solution, customers want those systems to be modernised.”
The final pillar, which customers are calling for, is acceleration.
“Customers need help to accelerate their digitalisation solutions. This gets into the realm of enabling technologies like automation optimisation, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain – whatever it takes to help the business accelerate.”
Inbetween talking to customers about what they from their enterprise software provider, Di Donata has also spent a lot of time with employees.
“SUSE has 1 360 employees, and I have spent the last five months listening to them,” she says.
“I have been to every major office around the world, on every continent and every region to hear what the employees think.”
When it comes to technology, Di Donato points out that SUSE has reinvented itself as a solutions company. “We no longer supply just the operating system, but reach all the way up the solutions stack.”
This resonates with customers, many of whom have great systems but are struggling to use their technology effectively.
“These customers are not looking for help with their operating systems; they need a partner to help them manage their systems further of the value chain.
“They need to focus on output. They want us to help them implement their technology in the best way, to architect it properly in a way that that is cloud-agnostic and enables flexibility.”
Other customers are looking for help with system utilisation and automation.
The bottom line, says Di Donato, is that customers are not in it for just the technology – they want solutions that help them to deliver tangible benefits to the business.
The South Africa operation is tasked with delivering the full solution stack in a relatively isolated environment.
“In many ways, South Africa is self-sustaining,” Di Donato says. “It’s a unique place, where everyone pitches in to get the job done.”
SUSE is expecting to grow fast in the year ahead, and South Africa is no exception.
Off a relatively small base, SUSE South Africa is growing around 20% a year. “This is good, but it’s not good enough,” Di Donato stresses, adding that the global operation is aiming for 50% growth in 2020.
Growing the South African office will be the first step in pushing business growth. A further eight o 10 people, mostly technical and pre-sales, will be added to the 25-person strong workforce this year.
“We are focusing particularly on technical trainers who can help to train customers,” Di Donato says. “We feel there are significant skills shortages in our customer base.
“Come of the most frequent requests I’ve had when visiting South African customers has been for certification.”
SUSE is also building up its technical resources and consulting skills.
“There is a perception that SUSE has traditionally been run engineers,” Di Donato says. “We don’t want to lose that, but engineering skills aren’t everything – although they are at the heart of the company’s solution set.”
Without losing that heart, she aims to a more structured organisation around that.
“If we give people more structure, they will be able to measure their success better; and it will give customers more security as well.
“When you are working with big customers they like to see a level of professionalism. So we need to foster that with losing the sense of entrepreneurial spirit and innovation that characterises SUSE.
“This is one of the most important parts of the culture. What has worked for the company is that so much of the emerging product set was built by our engineers at the request of our customers.
“We need to keep that, but we need to be a more professional organisation as well.”
Part of the company re-organisation involves streamlining the product offerings, and at least one product has already been discontinued as not fitting into SUSE’s future directions.
“This is the first time in the company’s history that we shut down development on a product,” Di Donato says. “It was a hard decision to make, but we had to do it because it wasn’t the future.”
Existing customers will be supported, but there will be no further versions of the product.
SUSE goes to market through a combination of channel and direct sales, with channel accounting for about 60% of total revenue.
“We aim to keep it at 60%,” Di Donato says. “Both channel and direct operations need to be healthy.”
Diversity and social responsibility
Diversity is very close to Di Donato’s heart.
She has been the technology group chair of the 30% Club, an organisation with the goal of achieving 30% female directors on S&P 100 boards by this year.
She also holds prominent positions in other organizations, including Notion Capital, and is a trustee for charity Founders4Schools.
On gender representation, her goal for SUSE is to achieve a 50:50 workforce – and she believes the company is in a unique position to achieve this.
“With open source every barrier to diversity is removed. I think it is the only industry that does this.”
Di Donato has a vision of mothers working from home, engineers putting in their hours at night, and disabled people able to join the workforce as remote workers.
“We want to show women in partilar that this could be a great way to work.”
Di Donato is driving the creation of groups embracing diversity at SUSE, championing gay rights and women development.
“I was overwhelmed by the number of people wanting to embrace diversity, but it wasn’t something they had spoken about. So we are raising awareness and have had a lot of successes.”
Mentoring is another activity that is big on the social awareness agenda at SUSE.
“One of my calls to action is for our people to be role models, to pay it forward and inspire people.”
The company has started a mentoring scheme whereby anyone who wants mentoring can raise their hand. They are then matched with mentor volunteers.
Charity is part of the culture too. Every employee gets a day off every year to dedicate to a charity of their choice. In May, the month of giving, employees vote for a charity which they all raise money for.
A hack week in March lets engineers work on any development they want, with a chance to share in the profits if it gets sold.
“We are trying to do things for good,” Di Donato says.